The String Sinfonia returns again this year, and has already been diligently rehearsing each week in preparation for its performing commitments this year.
Amongst the repertoire the ensemble is currently preparing are works by Handel, Vivaldi, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, Brahms and Mozart.
Their first performance is next month; keep an eye on the web for details of their concerts throughout this year.
As part of the Music department’s observing of the anniversary of World War One, including the Battle of the Somme, three events next week.
On Thursday 10 November, a special performance by the Cecilian Choir, conducted by Your Loyal Correspondent, commemorates the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme with a new choral piece written by American composer David Lang in Studio 3 Gallery. Memorial Ground is an evocative, haunting meditation on the Battle of the Somme, but also reaches beyond it to commemorate all those who have lost their lives in conflict ever since. The piece was commissioned as part of the nationwide 14-18NOW project.
As part of a national series of performances, Memorial Ground is the Pulitzer-prize-winning composer’s response to the anniversary, written in such a way as to allow choirs around the country to realise the piece in whatever way is appropriate to their occasion. For this performance by the Cecilian Choir, the piece will be combined with words by the First World War poet, Siegfried Sassoon, as well as with a new poem written by Nancy Gaffield, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of English. The performance will be illuminated by a series of projections from the Special Collections and Archives department in the Templeman Library, curated by Joanna Baines. This sepcially-crafted son et lumiere event begins at 1.10pm, and will last approximately twenty minutes; admission is free – if you can’t make it, the event will be streamed live online here.
On Friday 11 November at 11am, third-year Music Scholar and trumpeter Alex Reid will play the Last Post in the Registry Garden; this is followed at 1.10pm by a lunchtime concert focusing on poet and composer Ivor Gurney. Arranged by Dr Kate Kennedy, the event dramatizes Gurney’s life as musician, soldier and eventually asylum patient, following his progress in his own words and music, with humour and poignancy.
From the start of next week, Colyer-Fergusson Gallery will host an exhibition produced by the Gateways to the First World War Project exploring music during the conflict, which will be on display until Friday 25 November.
Find out about all these events and more online here.
The second in our Lunchtime Concert series next week sees the Kentish Piano Trio performing music by Beethoven and Suk, including (appropriately enough for a blog feature today…) Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio.
Violinist Kathy Shave, cellist Julia Vorhalik and pianist Helen Crayford, three outstanding professional musicians based in Kent, formed the ensemble in order to champion both traditional and contemporary works for piano trio, and have commissioned works as well as explored the catalogue of works for the enduringly popular line-up.
The concert takes place on Weds 9 November at 1.10pm in Colyer-Fergusson Hall, admission is free, donations welcome. To whet your appetite, here’s the trio on spooky form in the slow movement of the ‘Ghost’ Trio…
Thanks to percussion ensemble Kopanya, who delivered a mesmerising, hypnotic and in places downright exuberantly dynamic concert to open our new Lunchtime Concert series.
John Woolrich’s Mustering Drum provided an energetic opener to a concert showcasing the diversity of music for percussion, including John Cage’s Quartet for Percussion from 1935, with instrumentation sensitively organised by the ensemble to yield an hypnotic second movement laden with gongs. The group showed how a marimba could be turned into a shimmering curtain of sound in Peter Garland’s Apple Blossom, which saw all four members grouped around the instrument, and the concert concluded in epic fashion with traditional drumming from Senegal.
A dramatic way to launch our new series: our thanks to Kopanya! Next up is the Kentish Piano Trio in music by Beethoven and Suk on Wednesday 9 November – more details here.
We often have Music Scholarship students who are reading Law here at the University; yesterday two of them serenaded honoured guests at the lunch in Darwin college before the opening of the Wigoder Law Building in the afternoon.
Second-year violinst Lydia Cheng and cellist Faith Chan performed for the benefit of invited guests prior to the launch of the new building.
The new building, the new home for Kent Law Clinic at the University, was opened by.Baroness Hale, and the Hon Charles Wigoder also spoke at yesterday’s official opening.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the project; the building promises to be a wonderful enhancement to the University facilities and to Kent Law School.
Our new Lunchtime Concert series launches next week, with music from percussion ensemble Kopanya.
An exciting group of young players, their programme promises to celebrate the diversity of music for percussion, from the sublime to the ridiculous!
As always, the concert starts at 1.10pm, and admission is free with a suggested donation of £3. The first in our new series of lunchtime concerts, later events include the Kentish Piano Trio in November and sitar master Ustad Dharambir Singh in December.
You can find out more about all these events online here, or download the new brochure here.
We’re delighted to announce that the latest exhibition in Colyer-Fergusson Gallery is now open!
Created especially for the Colyer-Fergusson Gallery, Preludes (where you go, I go) by visual artist Adam de Ville is a series of images in response to Sinking of the Titanic by composer Gavin Bryars, a haunting meditation on the idea of what happens to the music played by the band as the great ship sank.
Adam’s exhibition imagines the same effect happening to paint and paper in a sequence of images capturing particular moments before, during and after the event. Based on accounts, personal stories and surviving artefacts, the series is a moving contemplation of the human side to one of history’s great tragedies.
The exhibition is showing in Colyer-Fergusson Gallery until Friday 4 November during normal opening hours, and admission is free. Find out more about Adam here.
Happy birthday to the jazz giant and saxophone colossus, John Coltrane, born today in 1926.
Legendary sideman, bandleader, endless searching to break new ground, Coltrane’s long shadow reaches beyond his untimely death from liver cancer at the age of forty, and embraces his time as sideman with Miles Davis to his own groups with figures including McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones to his increasingly experimental work with Pharoah Sanders, and late recordings with his second wife, Alice, as pianist.
Difficult to choose a commemorative listening track, but I’ve gone with the opening to 1964’s Crescent; an exploratory, questing opening leads into a slow, stately articulation of the melody, punctuated by uneasy rumbles on kit, before stepping off into a brisk swing, fistfuls of McCoy Tyner’s colourful chords underpinning a bold, expressive improvisation from Coltrane that typically grows more expansive as it unfurls.
Happy birthday to a jazz great.
